While the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund has drawn bipartisan criticism, Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., are bringing that criticism to court.
They asked for permission to file an amicus brief in the case of Floyd v. Department of Justice, in which a Virginia federal judge recently halted the fund from moving forward pending further litigation.
The administration has given mixed signals about backing away from the “slush fund,” as critics have called it, which was poised to enrich the president’s allies like the Jan. 6 defendants to whom he has already granted clemency.
The uncertainty as to what the legislative and executive branches will do makes the courts an important backstop.
In their motion seeking permission to file their amicus brief, lawyers for Booker and Cassidy said the senators are interested in the case “because they took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution” and “have a strong interest in ensuring that acts of Congress are faithfully executed by the Executive Branch.”
They said the fund “constitutes an improper and unconstitutional transfer of taxpayer dollars, including to those who engaged in a violent insurrection against the United States and its democratically elected representatives — including the United States Senate — on January 6, 2021.”
The senators expanded on their arguments in their proposed brief, in which they told the court they are weighing in “not as partisans” but as “representatives of the taxpayers whose funds have been committed to this scheme without statutory authorization, and as legislators who retain a direct constitutional stake in ensuring that the Executive Branch does not convert the public monies into an instrument of political reward.”